Learn From Their Mistakes – The Brain on Competition

If you’re in business for yourself, competition is just part of your day. But you may be watching for the wrong thing when it comes to assessing and beating your competition. According to one study at Bristol University, the brain seems to learn more when the competition makes a mistake rather than a winning move.

The team scanned subjects brains as they played a simple game against a computer. Players learned quickly from their own successes, but their neural activity was not increased when the computer opponent had successes. What DID light up the brains of players was when the computer made a mistake.

Such failures generated both reward signals in the brains of the players, and learning signals in regions involved with inhibiting response. This suggests that we benefit from our competitors’ failures by learning to inhibit the actions that lead to them.

What was even more surprising was that mirror neurons were activated in the players’ brains.

Such ‘mirror neuron’ activities occur when we observe the actions of other humans but here the players knew their opponent was just a computer and no animated graphics were used.

The take home here, of course, is that in business you’ll gain much more value from your competitor’s mistakes than from their successes.

Comments

I loved this post! See I knew there was a reason I tell all my clients about the blunders of larger firms and how to do better 🙂 Now if only I could apply that to my own firm and my website I think I would be in good shape!

One possible explanation for this phenomena would be that in the ancient world in which our brains were designed, a mistake in competition could be fatal. So it would be in the best interest of the brain to quickly learn, catalog, and simultaneously encode inhibition of those observed mistakes.

Whereas a competitors’ successes don’t offer much opportunity. If they’re already doing that thing right, repeating that behavior with your competitor isn’t likely to get you far. They’ve beat you to the punch anyway.

Interesting results, which now have me wondering about two things that might trigger it.

First hypothesis is that we notice others’ errors in order to remember not to repeat them. But wouldn’t we do the same with their successes? Unless fear of failure outweighs hope of success in our brains…

Second hypothesis is that in a competitive test (playing a game) the participants’ brains seized on errors in order to take advantage of them. That would be unique to errors, I think.

OK, scientists… back to the lab. I’ve given you your next hypotheses to test.

Karen, we wouldn’t necessarily learn as much from their successes because we wouldn’t have as much time to master the successes as we could move in on an opportunity made from mistakes. That’s just a theory, but I like to think it makes sense.

So that’s in line with my second hypothesis… We move in on an opponent’s mistake, thus remember it.

While it’s true we might not have time during competition to consider an opponent’s success (especially if it’s “Game over” and we lost), you’d think the lesson would stay with us? Or perhaps we don’t want to think about it too much?

More and more I’m liking that idea that we remember a competitor’s mistake that we have taken advantage of. It seems to explain the study’s results best.